English Poor Law Policy

Transcriber's note. The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.,
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA.
1910. ( Second Impression, 1913 )

Nothing of to-day, it may be suggested, can be really understood without its history. This, at any rate, is true of the complicated policy of the English Poor Law, which is now (1910) costing the public (for the United Kingdom) close upon twenty millions sterling every year; and which is producing, on the whole, results which led the Royal Commissioners of 1905-1909, without distinction of political or economic party or creed, to their unanimous and emphatic condemnatory verdict. That policy is embodied in a bewildering chaos of Statutes and Orders, Circulars and Minutes, general reports and official letters, the specific provisions of which, so far as they are contemporaneously in force, and so far as they are publicly known, the legal text-books and elementary manuals seek to re-arrange in such a way that the Poor Law Guardian or Workhouse Master may learn, at any rate, what is legally prescribed. But though a precise statement of what is to-day prescribed, in alphabetical or other order, may suffice for the practical work of the administrator, it does not afford us any idea of the general policy that lies behind the prescriptions, and fails even to enable the ordinary citizen to understand what is being done. We suggest, in short, that the English Poor Law policy of to-day cannot be correctly appreciated, or even intelligently comprehended, without some knowledge of the stages through which, in the course of the past seventy-five years, it has gradually been moulded into its present form. To any one who compares the contents of the Annual Report of the Local Government Board of to-day with those of the slim little volume in which the Poor Law Commissioners of 1835 described their activity, it will be evident that, throughout the whole range of the Poor Law, the Policy of the Central Authority has undergone great changes. What these changes have actually been, and at what dates and in what order they occurred, the following chronological analysis of the action of the Poor Law Commissioners, the Poor Law Board, and the Local Government Board for England and Wales attempts to set forth.